[buug] "Boundary Violations" by Hakim Bey

Zeke Krahlin zk_lists at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 27 12:33:44 PST 2001


I was struck by an essay "Boundary Violations" (author: Hakim Bey): how he
tied together cyberspace, capitalism, homosexuality, and the homeless
issue. As longterm BUUG members know, I am keenly interested in the
cultural phenomenon of hackers and how the Internet reflects society's
mores...and that I am also a gay activist and homeless advocate. Allow me
to quote the middle chunk of Bey's essay:

Boundary Violations, by Hakim Bey
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/boundary.html

---begin quote:

The metaphor of AIDS has been a godsend to crypto-ideologues like the APA,
who can make use of its semantic effluvia in terms like "boundary
violation" to hint obliquely at the underlying agenda of their therapeutic
control paradigm -- i.e., to erase the concept "childhood desire" and
replace it with the concept "abuse". If all sex is dirty and causes death,
then everyone must be "protected".
<snip>
The unconscious -- banished safely to the realms of advertising and
disinformation, or so we fondly imagined -- has come back to haunt us with
Godzilla-like vengeance -- raped by aliens and satanists!
<snip>
Of course the APA doesn't believe in UFO's -- but it does believe, quite
clearly, that pleasure is evil.

Some extremists in the "Deep" Ecology movements joined certain Xtian
bigots in hailing AIDS as God's plan (for overpopulation, not immorality),
and went on to suggest building a wall between the US and Mexico to keep
out the teeming billions of the angry South. Cut down to a few million
healthy hetero's America could restore its "wilderness" -- which the Deep
Ecolo's seem to envision as something like the Ayatollah Khomeini's idea
of heaven: -- clean, pure, aryan . . . well, maybe more like the SS's idea
of heaven. Ethnic cleansing is yet another panic reaction to the sensation
of "boundary violation". Abusers are, above all, aliens -- even though (as
the APA palpitatingly insinuates) they might look like . . . . you and me!
The other is the locus of all forbidden desire which we ourselves must
deny and hence project onto the unknown. But of course, that's Freudianism
-- or even
Reichianism! We have no desires. We are the victims of abuse. Q.E.D.

The new catchphrase "multiculturalism" simply hides a form of ethnic
cultural cleansing under a semantic mask of liberal pluralism.
Multiculturalism is a means of separating one culture from another, for
avoiding all possibility of cross-cultural synergy or mutuality or
communicativeness. At best multiculturalism provides the Consensus with an
excuse to commit a bit of cultural pillaging -- "appropriation" -- to add
some sanitized version of otherness to its own dreary uniform boredom --
through tourism , or vapid academic curricula based on "respect and
dignity". But the underlying deep structure of multiculturalism is fear of
penetration, of infection, of mutation, of inextricable involvement with
otherness -- of becoming the other. Again, there's a cure for tourism --
but it doesn't involve everyone staying home and watching TV. It
necessitates a simultaneous attack on uniformity, and
a breaking down of borders -- it demands both a genuine pluralism and a
genuine comradery or solidarity -- it deman ds conviviality.

Knowledge itself can be seen as a kind of virus. On the psychological
level this perception manifested recently as a panic about "computer
viruses", and more generally about computer hacking -- boundary violations
in cyberspace, so to speak. The governm ent wants access to all computer
cypher-codes in order to control the "Net", the InterNet, which might
otherwise spread everywhere, transmitting secrets, even secrets about
"abuse" and kiddy porn -- as if the Net were a disease, rather than simply
a free exchange of information. America's immune system can't take "too
much knowing" (or whatever T.S. Eliot's lame-ass phrase was); America must
be "protected" from penetration by foreign chaos cabals of evil hackers
(who might look just like you and me) -- borders must be imposed.

Cyberspace itself however involves a curious form of disembodiment in
which each participant becomes a perceptual monad, a concept rather than a
physical presence. Cyberspace parodies the gnostic demand for
transcendence of the body, which is literally " left behind" like a prison
of meat as one enters the pleroma of conceptual space. Ultimately one
wishes to "download the consciousness" and achieve purity, cleanliness,
immortality. Cyberspace proposes that life is not "in" the body, but in
the Spirit. And the spirit is . . . inviolate.

A preview of this paradise can be attained through phone-sex. Video-phones
were never "invented" because too many people hate their own faces (i.e.,
bodies) and don't want others to see them (too much boundary violation).
So, until cybersex is perfected , the uv-cyberspace of telephone-land -- a
soundscape of bodiless voices -- must be invested with all the sexuality
we cannot share with other bodies, or with "real-time" persons with real
personalities and desires. The deep purpose of phone-sex is proba bly not
really the client's masturbation or his credit card number, but the actual
ectoplasmic meeting of two ghosts in the "other" world of sheer
nothingness -- a poor parodic rendering of the phone company's slogan,
"Reach out and touch someone!" -- which is so sadly so finally what we
cannot do in cyberspace.

Of course the phone company, and everyone else, knows very well that you
cannot reach out and touch someone over a phone. What the slogan really
says is: -- Don't reach out and touch someone -- that's a boundary
violation! -- pay us instead to mediate between you and the very sense of
touch itself. The phone will save you from being touched.

Why then use the slogan, "Reach out and touch"? Ah, there's the secret of
desire, Benjamin's "Utopian trace" still embedded in the commodity. We
want to reach out and touch, but we also fear the invasion of sensation it
would entail; by using the phone we scratch an itch that we secretly know
will never heal. We'll never be "satisfied" by all this spookiness -- but
at least we shall be . . . . distracted.

Protectionism becomes the one true philosophy of any culture based on mass
anxiety about border violation; "safely" and "survival" become its
shibboleths and highest values. The "security state" emerges like an
abstract constellation figured against a ra ndom patterning of stars --
each star representing a threatened job, "dysfunctional" family,
"crime-ridden" neighborhood, black hole of boredom . . . . Power in the
security state emerges out of fear, and depends on fear for its rule. In
the society of S afety, all jobs are threatened, all families are
dysfunctional, crime is universal, and boredom is god. You may read the
signs of this power not only in the texts of the media which define it,
but even more clearly in the very landscape which "embodies" it. The PoMo
architecture of paranoid urbanism complements the already-picturesque
decay of the Modern, the haunted emptiness of
industrial ruins and abandoned farms. The aesthetic history of Capitalism
maps out a process of retreat, a withdrawal into t he psychic fortress,
the "drug-free-zone", the Mall, the planned community, the electronic
highway. We design for a life without immunity, believing that only
Capital can save us from infection. As we watch "History" unfold for us in
the media, includin g the media of cultural and political representation,
we become voluntary trance-victims of "terrorism" (the secret inner
structure of "protectionism"); -- in consequence, our political acts (such
as architecture) can express no higher vision than fear. The design of
private space is based on the easiest antidote to fear, which is boredom.

Ideally, Capital would like to discorporate entirely and retreat into the
cyberspace of electronic wealth (and electronics as wealth) -- of pure
speed, pure representation. The infinite "growth" which is Capital's
concept of immortality will indeed excee d all limits once economics
becomes a matter of digitalized data, or spiritualized knowledge, or
"gnosis". Not long ago, the glaciers of Capital covered the whole
landscape -- now the "ice" (William Gibson's SciFi slang for "data") is
withdrawing from ph ysical space and retreating toward the pole, the
mathematical point of abstraction, where a new and spiritualized topology
of pure informational space will open up for us, like that "heaven of
glass" with which the Gnostic Demiurge attempted to con the Angels of the
Lord. And we shall be saved -- safe at last -- beyond all corruption --
gone beyond.

Of course, as you know, very few will actually be taken up in this
Rapture. Actually, you've probably already been disqualified. As Capital
withdraws (like an army fleeing from phantoms, or phantoms fleeing an
army), a great deal of social triage will h ave to be practised. As the No
Go Zones are created and the wounded are left behind, entire new
populations of outsiders will be created. Too bad you'll have to miss that
last helicopter out of town. "Homelessness" constitutes such a Zone, a
kind of anti-architecture, a shell from which all services and utilities
have been withdrawn, leaving only a television blaring in a bare and empty
room, broadcasting cop-shows and messages of multiculturalism an d
dignity. That is, the spectacle of Power remains, while the "advantages"
of control have been disappeared. Any overt symptoms of autonomy amongst
the "victims" can be crushed by the last
interface between Power and nothingness: -- Robocop, M. de Land a's
"artificial intelligence" or war-automaton, the violence of a society
turned against itself.

As the map is infolded, certain privileged zones vanish into the "higher"
topology of virtual reality, while certain other spaces are sacrificed to
the world of decay, P. K. Dick's Ubik, the universal greyness of social
and biological melt-down. In such a scenario how can we play any role
other than victim? We've already lost, because we've defined ourselves in
relation to a situation of loss, and to a space of disappearance. In our
fear of all boundary invasions we discover that we ourselves have been
reclassified and categorized as viral. This time the Abuser/Terrorist
doesn't just look like you and me -- it is you and me. The "homeless are
criminal"; those who are not "taken up" have clearly "sinned".

---end of quote

If you read the entire essay, you'll find that Bey not only criticizes,
but offers up a sane solution to the dilemma of social tyranny and
conformism...which agrees with my own liberal and semi-anarchic ideas.

P.S.: Happy First Anniversary, BUUG! January 13, 2000 was the date of our
first gathering. Thanks immensely to early members such as Jon McClintock,
Feedle, Rick Moen, etc. for an excellent beginning (and continued
participation).


=====
Lavender-Velvet Revolution:
http://surf.to/gaybible

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